Author Archives: madelenr

Family Traditions

Collector: Were there any traditions you had for holidays?

Informant: We always used to have fondue on, oh, we always used to have fondue on Christmas Eve, and then, um, and then my mom would always light something on fire. That was part of it, um, but, that stopped. It would be accidental, but she would, like, knock over the fondue thing, and something would like… Actually on Thanksgiving, though, we used to have a tradition that something would catch on fire. It goes pretty…It happens pretty much every year. My grandma does that. She lit a cornucopia on fire once.

 

My informant is a freshman at the University of Southern California. She is from San Diego, California. We had this conversation in the study room of my sorority house.

 

This is really an interesting tradition, and I think this happens with a lot of families is that a tradition is accidentally created, and it just continues to happen for some reason. For me, every year, my aunt will make some type of joke, and my mother will get mad and everything from then on during the dinner. This seems like an unintentional family tradition that everyone looks back on and remembers but becomes a problem each holiday.

Pre-Game Ritual

Informant: I am scared of everything, so anyone else’s superstitions genuinely become mine because I am afraid.

Collector: Can you give me some examples?

MG: Um… When I was a rower, I, like, had to eat a very specific meal before every race, like, I wore, like, the same underwear every time under my uni, like, wore the same socks… I had a full orange, an orange sports bra, an orange set of underwear, and these orange socks that I wore, and one time, I could not find the other orange sock, and I had to go to Costco and buy another giant pack of socks because there was only one orange one in the set, but there were, like, it was a big set of socks.

 

Informant is a junior at the University of Southern California. She is studying communications here. She is from Boston, Massachusetts. She spent a while in the southern part of Spain, and speaks fluent Spanish. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.

 

We were in the middle of talking about folklore and ghost stories, and the conversation turned toward superstitions because Maya said she was very afraid of everything. She has a very particular way of doing things just because and often picks up habits from other people. This type of superstition is seen, I think, in a lot of different people. It manifests itself slightly differently every time, but for the most part many people who are athletes or performers have this type of superstition where they have a ritual or specific thing they need during every meet or performance.

Macbeth

Collector: I know my professor, like, theater ghosts…

Informant: Kind of, but I, like, there’s a lot of, like, a lot of other things besides that, too.

MR: I know my professor just told me a story about a theater ghost.

AA: Yeah, we didn’t have, like, theater ghosts. Of course, like, there is the play you never name, but, like, other than that…like…

MR: Talk to me about Macbeth

AA: I mean, I just know that, like, in the theater you don’t say the name.

Person:  Why would you say that?

AA: It’s just, it’s just, you don’t.

Person: Superstitious, yeah, why would you say that word? I’ve never said it.

MR: You’ve never said it?

Person: I studied it in my sophomore year English class, and I never said it.

MR: Wait, aren’t you not supposed to say it when you’re in the theater?

AA: Yeah I thought it was more in the theater—

Person: Especially when you’re not in the theater—

Person: Specifically, yeah…

Person: I don’t say it at all. I’m very—I’m also genuinely—I’m like, easily scared.

 

Informant is a junior at the University of Southern California. She is studying Human Biology, and she is a dancer and has been for many years. She is from San Diego, California. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants, Maya Getter, Diana Huang, and Sarah Campbell. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.

 

This is also interesting because we spoke about this in class as well. It seems that some people have different superstitions about when and when you cannot say the name. I think the conclusion I have come to is that absolutely nobody says it while they’re inside the theater, but some people take the superstition further and don’t say the name outside, either. This is an interesting divergence between personalities and how others influence your beliefs.

Names

Collector: Oh! Do the story about why that guy got mad at you, or got mad at someone…

Informant: So, I don’t know if you’ve heard this story Maddie, um when I was in Spain, uh, so the word, like the colloquial term for blowjob is a person’s name in every city in Spain, and so, um, like in my friend’s town Toledo, Maria, and then in Granada it’s Victoria, um, so that’s just the context. So, I’m out with my friends—I was friends with this Spanish guy named Mario—and in Spain you go on dates, it’s like middle school style dating, so group dates. And so, um, Mario would ask me out and said invite some of your friends, so me and my two American friends were meeting up with his two friends, but then last minute his really good friend from where he’s from, Cordova, came to visit down in Granada, and so we were like—he was like “one more person” and I was like “oh my other friends are busy,” and he was like, “it’s fine, like [whatever his name is] will just come hang out”—I think his name was David. And so, we’re all at this bar hanging out, and then, um, we were doing like a pub crawl, and so we were supposed to head down to the next place, and so, um, his other friend, Luis, was like “oh guys we’re going to this next bar in 5 minutes, like finish your drinks,” and so like all the Spanish people are lightly sipping, and the Americans start to, like, you know, really try and down their drinks, and my friends, Claire and Diana, had like straws in their drinks and so they were trying to, kind of like, furiously sip.

Person: You have another friend named Diana?

Informant: Mhm

Person: Rude. Rude!

Informant: She looks nothing like you, so it’s okay.

Person: Sorry, continue.

Informant: She’s Italian and from upstate New York. Um, and so, we—but I had a beer, and so I needed to like, chug it, so I just, you know, like, I’m an adult and a frat star, I chug my beer. And I look, everyone’s kind of staring at me, because in Europe you don’t have to, like, chug your drinks because you’re an adult, um and you can drink it slow and be a normal person. Um, and so I’m like, whatever, I did it, it’s done, don’t make fun of me. And, um, I look up, and David is like smirking, and he says, “Aye que buenas Mayas,” and in Granada, at least in Spain, mallas, I’ve always been taught that means leggings, so it’s M-A-L-L-A-S, leggings, like, you know, like, the pants, so, um, I was like “what?” because I was wearing jeans, so I was like, maybe he thinks these are like, jeggings, okay whatever. And, like, I look over at Mario, and Mario looks furious. And I’m like, okay. And he said something really fast to David in Cordovan slang, and—Cordovian—and like, I don’t know what it means, and I, but I can tell he’s really pissed, but I’m like, I don’t know why you’re angry, okay. And so we start walking to the next bar, and I’m like holding hands with Mario, and I’m like, “Why were you so upset?” And he was like, “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t understand, I didn’t really get the joke, so like what did that mean?” Because like Mario speaks English and Spanish, and so in Spanish I’m asking this, but like, “Can you explain it in English because I don’t get it.” And he was like, in English, “No we’re not going to talk about it.” And I was, he never speaks to me in English unless I ask him to, so I was like, “No, just, just, tell me.” And he like, will not say it, and I’m like, I’m the worst, when I want to know something, I will, I will force you to tell me, and so eventually he’s like, “He was saying, you know like how here Victoria means, like, blowjob?” I was like, “yeah.” He was like, “Well, in like, our town, outside of Cordova, like, Mayas are like blowjobs.” And I was like, “Wait what?” And he was like “Cause, you know, you chugged your drink, so you have to like open your throat, just kind of pour it…” And I was like, “Oh, Bueno, Bueno, [what sounds like “tamos”] a qui…” I switched right back to Spanish, because I was like I don’t want to talk about this hmmmm. So, that’s the end of that story.

 

Informant is a junior at the University of Southern California. She is studying communications here. She is from Boston, Massachusetts. She spent a while in the southern part of Spain, and speaks fluent Spanish. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.

 

I had recalled her telling this story, and thought that it was interesting and a new part of a culture I wasn’t very familiar with. As we were sitting at lunch discussing folklore, I remembered that she had told me this before, and asked her to tell it again. I haven’t heard of any other culture that does this to so much of an extent. It seems that every place, or so it’s suggested, uses some woman’s name for blowjob. It’s also interesting to see the difference in cultures having to do with the consumption of alcohol. It seems that a stereotype perpetuated by the party culture of many large and small universities is so different than the way the majority of the world consumes alcohol.

Haunted Hotel

Informant: There’s this hotel in Boulder, Colorado, it’s like a thing, it’s actually, there’s a thing in Boulder Colorado where this room, it’s 314, I think it’s 314, um, has like, some weird ghostly connection to things. So, um, I was on this thing called the Banjo Billy’s Bus tour, it’s a thing, um, and, he was talking about how in room 314 of the music hall in Boulder, there was like some sort of suicide or something and then in the boulder hotel, not sure what the actual name is but it’s like a very known hotel for ghost stories, and um, in room 314 there was a woman or some sort of suicide and then a woman tried to kill herself with chloroform and then a man tried to kill himself—a bunch of people tried to kill themselves in that room. And when you go to that room, like when we went to that room after the tour, we were standing there and then you could feel like a rush of like chills, and then my mom and I were waiting for the elevator because it was on the third floor and I don’t know why we didn’t just go down the stairs and everyone had already gone down the elevator and we heard footsteps and nobody was there so we ran down the stairs. Fun story!

 

Informant is a sophomore at the University of Southern California. She is studying Narrative Studies and plans to have a minor in Songwriting. She is from a suburb outside of Chicago, Illinois. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.

 

This is an interesting ghost story, and you can see the connection between the numbers in this story and others. Many haunted rooms are on a floor with the number 13 in them, and this has that flipped around, but these numbers are often found having to do with haunted places. It seems that many hotels have stories about people dying in them.